#1326: Cindy Asmussen

Cindy Asmussen is the Central Texas Area Director for the wingnut organization Concerned Women for America. They apparently have chapters all over the place, each of which apparently contains at least a few people like Asmussen (the south Texas area director, Pat Hanson, has for instance been involved in fighting the teaching of evolution and global warming in Texas public schools) – we won’t be able to cover them all, of course, but Asmussen can stand as an illustrative example .

So Asmussen doesn’t fancy gays. In 2011, for instance, she received some attention for her plea to boycott Macy’s over the company’s LGBT rights policy. In fact, Asmussen wasn’t just concerned about “the lesbian, ‘gay,’ bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) agenda in our nation;” she also complained against the Obama administration’s efforts to fight both legal and social discrimination against LGBT people around the world. Such efforts, said Asmussen, infringes on the rights of people who don’t support LGBT rights and undercut ‘ex-gay’ reparative therapy. And that, Asmussen, is the kind of claim that will land you an entry in our Encyclopedia.

Of course, Asmussen has deluded herself into believing that she is the victim: “LGBT activists want to alter OUR lifestyles by intimidating us into accepting what we know is not of God, by trying to inhibit our free speech rights and abilities to speak out against it, and by forcing us to use the same dressing rooms.” Yes, people like Asmussen say things like that, even though it is so ridiculous that no minimally reasonable person could actually consciously believe it is true. We are hence forced to conclude that Asmussen is repeating it without actually thinking about what she is saying. In other words, she is bigotbotting.

Diagnosis: Bigotbot.     

#1325: Eugene C. Ashby

Eugene C. Ashby is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology, and a hardcore intelligent design creationist. As a creationist, Ashby has apparently made a zealous effort to perpetuate all the standard misunderstandings and untruths concerning evolution associated with creationism, many of which he published in his book (tract, really) Understanding the Creation/Evolution Controversy, in which he amply demonstrated that he does not understand the Creation/Evolution “controversy”. Oh yes, you will find the creationist distinction between macro- and microevolution, Haeckel’s embryos, and peppered moths, and that’s just the beginning. It’s really all there.

Ashby also supported the infamous disclaimer stickers in Cobb County, GA, put on biology textbooks proclaiming that evolution is “a theory, not a fact”. And, since he does indeed possess a legitimate degree (contrary to what you’d be led to expect from his support for the aforementioned sticker), a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism.

Diagnosis: Pseudoscientist. Ashby has a real degree, but his education does not seem to have given him much grasp of science.

#1324: Inanna Arthen

Inanna Arthen is, according to her bio, a “trained psychic and professional Tarot reader, Inanna has taught classes in psychic development, meditation and ‘practical magick working,’ and has extensive knowledge and experience of every branch of paranormal phenomena.” That’s not a good start for making inquiries into anything having to do with reality, and Arthen’s attempts to carry out such inquiries are … well, in fact, somewhat novel.

Arthen is most famous for her claims that vampires are real, a claim that initially brought her some underground fame through this article in 1987. Vampires are beings who “appear on the surface to be somewhat eccentric members of society, yet their outward idiosyncrasies only hint at how different they are from those around them.” In fact, “[a] vampire is a person born with an extraordinary capacity to absorb, channel, transform, and manipulate ‘pranic energy’ or life force.” For the most part, then, vampires feed off of your life energy, though they sometimes drink blood as well: “Only real vampires can directly absorb the pranic energy in fresh blood, and for this reason some real vampires are attracted to blood and find different means of obtaining it.” You identify them “by a certain quality to the energy,” and by the fact that they are night people: they have excellent night vision, but are sensitive to sunlight and frequently experience digestive trouble.

Unfortunately, most vampires are unaware of their own true natures. “Evolved” vampires may, however, “become extraordinary magicians and healers,” and according to Arthen pagan magickal people like herself should work to identify vampires and help them evolve. So there you go.

Diagnosis: Her career seems to be primarily based on writing fiction. Some of it she apparently – rather randomly – designates as “non-fiction” because she is a loon.

#1323: Joe Arpaio

Joe Arpaio is the wingnut sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, an office nominally designated as an agency for upholding the law, rather than what Arpaio personally thinks should be the law (no, he does not seem to be aware of the difference). Or as Balko aptly described him: “a power-mad, office-abusing sheriff who has misspent millions in taxpayer funds, and who once let a celebrity drive a damned tank into a man’s home (on suspicion of cockfighting, no less).” Fortune, however, placed Arpaio on the other side of the bar, to the dismay and horror of anyone even minimally civilized.

For instance, Arpaio has taken a very hard line against illegal immigration. Indeed, he declines to hand illegal immigrants over to federal authorities for deportation (instead jailing them), and the office has been so busy hunting illegal immigrants that nothing else has really received much attention (including over 400 sexual assault cases, most of which involve children, whichhe didn’t bother to look into – indeed, the sheriff’s office readily admitted that they didn’t care). In the end (May 2012), the Justice Department filed a civil suit against Arpaio in Federal court due to multiple civil rights violations primarily aimed at the Latino population of Maricopa County (a brief summary of his civil rights violations is here); and yes, the conclusion was, unsurprisingly, that Arpaio has engaged in systematic discrimination against Latino residents of his county (and he did, eventually, receive a mild slap on his wrist). But then again, Arpaio doesn’t really believe in civil rights, at least not free speech, and at least not when it is used to criticize him (which he does think constitutes violation of his civil rights). And yes, he is still a racist – and still a hero of the Western conservatives – those things are, frankly, not unrelated.

Arpaio also uses the sheriff's office, including its official communication organs, as self-promotion tools, including the publication of his political differences with the federal government and of his opinions on Arizona political happenings; he also sells prison equipment (especially those indicative of his own dubious civil rights track record) as souvenirs through an outfit called the Posse Foundation, once again with funding from the sheriff’s office.

But Arpaio is by far most famous for his birther activism – indeed, he may probably be said to be the leading birther activist in the US after assuming the mantle from Orly Taitz following the latter’s repeated crashes and burns (not that any of them has stopped her), and making the WND all giddy in the process. In particular, Arpaio argues, partially on the grounds of info – incoherent rants – he obtained from Taitz, that President Obama’s birth certificate and selective service (draft) registration card are fakes. His volunteer “Cold Case Posse” conducted an “investigation” together with Jerome Corsi – Arpaio was baffled and angry that no one but the WND seemed to pay much attention – and then held an impressively long press conference to announce their findings: the documents are fraudulent and Obama was probably born abroad and is not eligible to be President (who would have expected that outcome from their fair and unbiased investigations). Their evidence was heavily dependent on the idea that the birth certificate’s electronic form, as released online by the White House, differed from a “control” sample certificate that they scanned themselves. Suffice to say that few people not already committed to the birther cause were impressed. On the other hand, Tea Party intellectual strategist Judson Phillips actually seemed to believe that Arpaio’s “findings” would lead to criminal charges against Obama. More interestingly, the man in charge of running Arizona’s elections, Secretary of State Ken Bennett, claimed he became unsure whether Barack Obama was really born in the United States after Arpaio’s revelations, and threatened to keep the president off the ballot for the 2012 election. No Ken: no one actually believes that you came to those conclusions based on Arpaio’s research.

It is worth mentioning that the day before Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse” released the report, the lead investigator, Michael Zullo, published a book on the topic, co-authored with Jerome Corsi. It is also worth mentioning that Arpaio conducted his birther investigations using taxpayer money.

But Arpaio wasn’t done, and with Zullo he made another ridiculous attempt in July 2012, adding the claim that super-secret codes were hidden in the birth certificate and that some very old person (not present at the press conference) was the only one who could figure out what those codes actually meant. They also asserted that Hawaiian police were following Zullo around to harass him during his “investigation” (meanwhile the above-mentioned civil lawsuit against Arpaio was going on, but that was of course completely unrelated). Zullo, on his side, has continued to present his “evidence” at various venues, including the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention, where Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas), attended and was, according to Zullo, “deeply concerned about it and he really does want to have a lengthy, lengthy discussion about this.” In December 2013, the WND once again promised a “universe-shattering” birther revelation in the near future – Zullo was “unable to reveal details at the moment,” but it would be “beyond the pale of anything you could imagine”. Let us predict it will be the same nebulous tripe as every time before, shall we? (We haven’t heard much new since that article, at least.) Arpaio, on his side, was apparently too busy making “progress” on the investgations to run for the office of governor of Arizona – he has even teamed up with Larry Klayman. The Obama administration, being afraid of his investigation, was at the same time intentionally sending minors from Central America to his home county as a personal “affront” to his notorious anti-immigrant activism. “The White House is incompetent and the dumping of illegals is intentional,” he said.

In early 2013, after the Sandy Hook shootings, Arpaio announced he would form an all volunteer posse of “well trained”, gun-carrying patrols to drive around town and protect the schools. In early February 2013 it was predictably discovered that his posse included at least one convicted child molester, and several men convicted of domestic abuse. The training was given by criminal justice expert Steven Seagal, whose qualifications include “hundreds of thousands if not millions of hours into my weapons training.”

Arpaio is due to face a contempt hearing in April 2015 over his repeated failure to comply with previous court orders in the ongoing court case involving his blatant violation of the civil rights of suspects and prisoners. We are looking forward to it.

Diagnosis: Racist, fascist, old-fashioned conspiracy theorist. That he ends up being the one who nominally defends the law in Maripose County unfortunately tells you more than a little about the residents of that county.

#1322: Virginia Armstrong

Virginia Armstrong is the national chair of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Armstrong is, accordingly, a seriously hardcore loon. According to Armstrong, America is locked in “the deadly struggle between the Humanistic worldview and the Judeo-Christian worldview,” and she elects to proudly carry the torch for the third side of delusional fundie insanity. Why “deadly”? Well, Armstrong blamed the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, for instance, as “among the “graphic results of America's Culture War”. More precisely,  she blamed “activist/liberal federal judges” who “have long been fighting to expunge every vestige of God from our nation's classrooms and public life;” moreover, the “teaching of evolutionism” leads to “youths behav[ing] like animals” and reproductive choice leads to “our youths conclude that they, too, have the right to kill the children around them.” In conclusion, “[w]e rightly grieve over the losses of Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, and the abortion chambers still spewing out cauldrons of innocent American blood. We should also grieve over a major cause – America's activist/liberal federal judges who have sown the wind, while our children reap the whirlwind. Surely it is time for us to CURB THE COURTS and reclaim our children and our country.” The facts be damned: America is going to hell, regardless of the fact any reasonable parameter of measurement actually suggests the opposite.

And no, she doesn’t like evolution (and no, she doesn’t even begin to understand evolution), as shown by this breathtaking comment:

“Fact v. Fiction #2: Evolutionists claim that their battle against creation-science is primarily a ‘scientific’ issue, not a constitutional question. But our treasured U. S. Constitution is written by persons and for persons. If man is an animal, the Constitution was written by animals and for animals. This preposterous conclusion destroys the Constitution. The Aguillard Humanists leave us with no Constitution and no constitutional rights of any kind if they allow us to teach only that man is an animal.” [Emphasis in the original]

Right. I don’t like linking to their websites, but her own “Constitutionalist Manifesto” must also be seen to be believed. While professing to like the Constitution she clearly has no idea how it is supposed to work.

According to her bio, she holds “the” Ph.D in political science and public law. She never says from where.

Diagnosis: Zeal, ardent fundamentalism, and a complete, well-demonstrated lack of how science, society or reality actually work. There seems to be a competition among certain segments of the religious right to be as dumb, uninformed, and critical thinking-challenged as possible. As such, Armstrong has made a pretty strong case for herself.